SCOTUS on YouTube: Now, how about real cameras?

The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington is seen last October. A sneaked video of a recent oral argument has once again spotlighted the justices' aversion to having their proceedings televised.

The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington is seen last October. A sneaked video of a recent oral argument has once again spotlighted the justices' aversion to having their proceedings televised. (Susan Walsh / Associated Press)

Surreptitiously recorded videos of Supreme Court proceedings that surfaced on YouTube last week aren't much of a viewing experience. The most revealing video, which captures a few moments from two oral argument sessions, is a jerky affair that makes Abraham Zapruder's amateur footage of the Kennedy assassination look like the work of an auteur.

And the justices are bit players: The star of the video is Noah Kai Newkirk, a Los Angeles man who stood up during arguments Wednesday to denounce the court's 2010 Citizens United decision allowing corporations to spend money on politics.

Yet, despite its intrinsic lack of interest, the video has created a frisson among court watchers and in the general public because it represents a flouting of a Washington taboo: the court's ban on TV cameras.

But the proper lesson to draw isn't that the court should be more assiduous in keeping spectators from smuggling video-equipped cellphones into the building; it's that the court's public proceedings should be regularly and professionally televised, as those in Congress have been for decades.

Members of the court have offered several reasons for the no-cameras rule, all of them specious. Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested that televising oral arguments might deprive some justices of their anonymity and make them prey for terrorists. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has expressed concern that if cameras were present, a justice might say something "for a soundbite." Most recently, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested that televising arguments would "leave a false impression … that the oral argument is what is decisive in the cases."

You don't have to be an experienced legal advocate to refute these arguments. Terrorists who might want to attack Supreme Court justices already know what they look like. Soundbites of justices' comments can already be snipped from the audio recordings of arguments that are posted on the court's website; some of these have been recycled on news broadcasts (such as Justice Antonin Scalia's comparison of a health insurance mandate to a law requiring people to buy broccoli). And if televising arguments deludes people into thinking that the justices don't also consider written briefs, the same can be said for making the arguments available in audio form.

We suspect the real explanation for the justices' camera-shyness is institutional inertia, combined with a snobbish assumption that the court isn't like those vulgar political branches. Neither attitude is defensible. The public shouldn't have to rely on bootleggers or protesters to catch a glimpse of the public proceedings of an important part of their government. Cue the cameras.

The Supreme Court's surprising decision last week to hear a new challenge to the Affordable Care Act has once again focused attention on Chief Justice John Roberts, who cast the deciding vote in a 2012 decision that saved Obamacare from being declared unconstitutional. Many court watchers...

Should a fisherman face two decades in prison for discarding a few fish at sea? That question is at the core of a statutory interpretation case the Supreme Court heard in November, but it also raises another question: What does "cruel and unusual punishment" mean today?

The United States protects free expression to a far greater extent than other liberal democracies. But even many free-speech advocates are uneasy about a case argued in the Supreme Court this week involving a Pennsylvania man who took to Facebook to engage in violent and vituperative speech...

Easy for them to say, since they’re already on the Supreme Court, but three justices agreed the other day that the court isn’t diverse enough. In a forum at their alma mater, Yale Law School, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court would benefit if so...

The decision by a Missouri grand jury not to indict Police Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown turned largely on the issue of whether the unarmed man posed an immediate threat. And it pointed out how complicated, legally, the issue of what constitutes a threat can be.

This week the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to rule on the constitutionality of an L.A. city ordinance that gives police easy access to hotel records and punishes hotel managers who don't hand them over with fines or jail time. The justices should agree with a lower court that the ordinance...

Justice Samuel A. Alito's sister is a high-powered labor attorney who represents management in disputes with workers. Justice Elena Kagan's brother, a teacher at an elite public school in New York, has protested the school's admissions process because of low minority enrollment. And Justice...

At the Supreme Court argument in King vs. Burwell, the case challenging how the Affordable Care Act works, someone should have asked, “If a state with a federally run health insurance exchange now adopts or ratifies that marketplace as its own, wouldn't it qualify as a state-established...